From Texas, I mostly cover the energy industry and the tycoons who control it. I joined Forbes in 1999 and moved from New York to Houston in 2004. The subjects of my Forbes cover stories have included T. Boone Pickens, Harold Hamm, Aubrey McClendon, Michael Dell, Ross Perot, Exxon, Chevron, Saudi Aramco and more. Follow me on twitter @chrishelman.

While H. Ross Perot Sr. famously railed against free trade and government debt, his namesake has built another family empire by leveraging them both. The result is one of the world’s great logistics hubs–and a third billion-dollar fortune for the Texas dynasty.

Lifting off from his helipad atop the roof of the W Hotel in Dallas, H. Ross Perot Jr. — the 54-year-old son of the cantankerous octogenarian billionaire who upended American politics in the 1990s –has his hands on the stick and his eyes on the horizon as he looks toward his empire.

His calm, easy baritone, as he relays his position to air traffic controllers, poses a striking contrast to his dad’s trademark squeak and his own stiff, serious manner on the ground.

In 1982 he was the first man ever to circumnavigate the globe in a helicopter, and he still logs about ten hours a month piloting various aircraft (he flew Air Force fighter jets in the 1980s).

After 20 contented minutes of darting across flat suburban sprawl, he spots AllianceTexas, his 18,000-acre, master-planned commercial, transportation and residential development in the northern reaches of Fort Worth. The scene below is bustling.

Each week FedExFedEx lands hundreds of planes at Fort Worth Alliance Airport, near its regional sorting hub. Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s massive rail yard receives thousands of cargo containers, many from China via Long Beach, Calif., and loads them onto the back of semitrailers destined for Interstate 35 or the 30 million square feet of warehouse space on-site. J.C. Penney’s biggest distribution center is here, as is the world’s largest iPhone fulfillment hub, courtesy of AT&TAT&T. General ElectricGeneral Electric manufactures locomotives near where Motorola will soon assemble its Moto X phone. And so on and so on, as far as we can see.

“This is one of the highest-growth regions of the nation,” he explains over the chopper’s headset. “We have all the tools to get the economy moving again.”

Just as the skies long offered refuge from the strict suit-and-tie world that he grew up in, that ground below has given Perot the chance to escape his father’s shadow as a businessman. When Perot started buying land out here 30 years ago it was “nothing but cattle and wheat fields.” His development company, Hillwood, is probably the most important force in Texas real estate, which is finally lurching forward again.

Perot’s success here carries no small dose of irony. He possesses the ultimate real estate asset–location–thanks to the emergence of Mexico’s economy and Texas’ centrality in a logistics chain that now encompasses all of North America. Twenty years after Perot Sr.’s naive rants against free trade–remember the promised “giant sucking sound” of U.S. jobs flowing down to Mexico after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement?–his son controls the largest “inland port” on the continent, where the only vacuum noise is from the cash flying into the family bank accounts. “No one can compete with the North American trading block if it gets its act together,” Perot Jr. now says. Alliance ranks as the top foreign trade zone in the U.S., receiving more than $4 billion of imported goods per year.

His father’s other main platform was against runaway government deficits. And while that point was very well taken, it conveniently ignored the fact that Perot’s wealth was kick-started by fat government contracts. The senior Perot cleared more than a billion on his first company, Electronic Data Systems, which grew in lockstep with federal entitlements and the sophisticated computer processing they demanded. He then repeated the trick with Perot Systems, in partnership with his son, who served as president, then chairman. Perot Jr.’s massive project has benefited from public largesse as well, in the form of infrastructure subsidies and tax breaks, rather than contracts . The results, however, will show the same outcome: a third ten-digit score for the family over a three-decade time period. Ironic or not, that’s a remarkable track record.

“The world wants things done, not excuses,” says Perot Sr., now a spry 83, about his son’s project. “One thing done well is worth a million good excuses.”

Ross Perot Jr. had a front-row seat for the first modern Texas fortune. In a state that traditionally generated wealth by working the land or exploiting what’s under it, Perot Sr., a onetime IBMIBM salesman, understood the promise of computers, and he toted along his only son (he also has four daughters) for the entire ride. “I got to see the American Dream unfold in my living room,” says the younger Perot. “I used to collect computer punch cards from the data centers.”

Perot founded Electronic Data Systems in Dallas in 1962 to help convince executives and government officials that they needed computers–and needed EDS employees to install and operate them. His timing couldn’t have been better: Another legendary Texan, Lyndon Johnson, was ramping up his Great Society. Perot thrived on contracts that administered Medicare and Medicaid. In 1971 the leftist magazine Ramparts tagged Perot as “America’s first welfare billionaire,” and his son saw how lucrative it could be to row in the same direction as government spending priorities.

By 1984 EDS was a giant, processing health care claims and running government IT networks. General MotorsGeneral Motors bought the company to streamline its data processing needs, for $2.1 billion. Perot’s take came to over $800 million in cash and a big chunk of GM shares, which he later sold for $700 million. In 1988, on the day his GM noncompete was up, Perot did it all again. Starting with $20 million of his own money, he founded Perot Systems, staffing it with former EDS employees and tapping his son to lead it. In 2009 Dell bought them out for $3.9 billion, and for the second time Perot, this time with his son, cleared $1 billion on a sale.

While he now serves on Dell’s board, Perot Jr. has always been less interested in computers than in land and logistics. In the late 1970s the elder Perot built a master-planned community called Legacy in Plano, north of Dallas, that encompassed EDS headquarters. The oil boom of 1981 spurred a gold rush in land speculation north of downtown Dallas and toward the airport. But when boom turned to bust, land prices tumbled.

Perot Jr., fresh from the Air Force, saw opportunity. He figured the same kind of transformation was fated for the empty land north of downtown Fort Worth. In 1986 father and son formed the first Hillwood partnership. Perot Sr. bought the first parcel north of Fort Worth and enabled Jr. to borrow against his prodigious assets to acquire more. But as Texas slumped into depression, so did land prices. “As land collapsed around us, we continued buying,” says Jr.

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Sharon Boyd is was wrong with this country. To compare what the Perots are doing with “welfare” is a bunch of BS. How many net jobs did Perots action bring to northern Fort Worth? 35,000. I don’t understand why people such as Ms. Boyd keep commenting on “corporate welfare.” Their comments are based in the ludicrous idea that companies must either pay all their profits to employees or to the government, investors should get nothing. “Profits be damned” is the broad mantra by left wing incompetents who have no understanding of economic development.

Ms. Boyd, Detroit alleviated corporate welfare. They forced the auto companies to get off the state and local trough. How did that work out for them? City bankruptcy. Is Boyd now planning to rail against state and local government welfare? Is she going to stand up against tax rates as government welfare? Is she going to stand up against a do-nothing state legislature or Congress and count their salaries and benefits as “government welfare.” She should to avoid being a hypocrite.

While you rail against Ms. Boyd, a lot of what she said about H. Ross Perot Jr. was correct. During the time that Ross was propositioning the Texas Department of Transportation to put the road (114) through there, I was very familiar with his tactics. Yes he did bring jobs to the area; but the cities and other government agencies paid steep prices for it. He never started a project unless some government entity would pony up to his demands or he wouldn’t do the project. He was well noted of having his lawyers present large contracts on a Friday and expect an answer by Monday. He tried to destroy the city of Westlake over the Circle T Ranch because they would not endorse his plans for the development of the property. He tied the city up in court for years and tried to get sections of the city torn apart and annexed to other near by cities. Everything that Ross Perot Jr. does is always on his terms.

Anyone this big in logistics needs to be up on the advances of energy. Solar is predicted to replace other forms of electricity in the coming decades, & at some point fusion, a clean energy will take over. What I can not understand is why no body is refuting these damned cafe standards. Those hit a guy like jr here right in the profits. Anything being used today for transportation of goods is being destroyed by emissions standards, for zero added benefit to the environment. Basically, business is committing suicide merely for lack of having a grasp on the truth about what these horrific laws are doing. Maybe it’s too late now, to ask people to retract the government claws from America’s transportation jugular. But I gotta say it. It’s like watching people suffer all bogged down, slow, inefficient, costly, for really no reason other than to stroke the ego of leftist demagogues. It’s all pretty ugly, if you know what these regulations have done to transportation. & absolute nonsense.

I would like to see one of these billionaires do something of success with no connections or money to invest. That would be a great way to teach others how to build from the ground up. Anyone can make money if they have money. Franchise, sell things in different locations where they aren’t. Offer services that aren’t in certain areas. Advertise where people who don’t have money can’t advertise, create inventions, etc. I know for a fact once I had the ball rolling I would expand and excel as well. I’d just like to see one of these so called “Successful people” live in my house with me with a pen and a paper and the average americans bank account and see them work. That is not going to happen though. Another idea that could be great is taking the scouting concept on sports and applying it towards the open minds all around the globe. Some of the greatest ideas are yet to come. But without knowing someone who knows someone, or having assets to blow, or being in the right place at the right time, hundreds if not thousands of possibilities are missed. Because the same minds are around the same minds constantly. Take politics for example. Same thing over and over again.

Perot Sr. went to junior college, then the Naval Academy, where he became president of his class. Then after the Navy, he became a salesman for IBM, where he was a top performer. They weren’t receptive to his ideas for improving their business, so he left to start his own company. The story is that Perot was refused seventy-seven times before he was given his first contract.

You sound full of sour grapes, since it looks like he just worked harder than you.

“Twenty years after Perot Sr.’s naive rants against free trade–remember the promised “giant sucking sound” of U.S. jobs flowing down to Mexico after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement?”

It is equally naive to believe that the millions of American jobs which left the country is not due to the free trade agreements and tariff restructuring.

The U.S. lost jobs to Mexico, yes. But we can hope that the new trend of Mexico regaining jobs lost to China will be a longterm boon to the entire North American trading block. I think that anything that encourages economic growth in Mexico will be good for the United States.

All the sites are warehouse distribution points for shipping Chinese-made goods to US buyers. Nothing about manufacturing jobs which are the key to long-term prosperity. As Senior said, do you hear that giant sucking sound?